The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson

23. “FREE O.J.!”

One night toward the end of the Fuhrman-tapes controversy, many leading figures of the African-American community in Los Angeles filled the vast Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for the annual Soul Train Lady of Soul Awards. Gladys Knight hosted this annual salute to black women in show business, and at the climax of the nationally televised broadcast of the ceremony, she said she had a special announcement. “To present the Lena Horne Award for outstanding career achievements,” Knight said, “here is a man who has been a wonderful friend to all of us… a longtime supporter of everything good and positive that takes place in our community-Mr. Johnnie Cochran!”

Cochran appeared from behind a curtain, splendidly turned out in a perfect tuxedo and bright red cummerbund. The audience of three thousand burst into loud cheers when Cochran stepped forward, a greeting that quickly turned into a standing ovation, the warmest greeting any celebrity received at the event that evening. A handful of spectators started a chant, which spread in a few seconds to the entire crowd:

“Free O.J.!”

“Free O.J.!”

“Free O.J.!”

Standing at center stage, Cochran acknowledged the cheer with a pontifical wave. “I promise I’ll work hard to do that,” he said. Then he turned to introduce a brief highlight film of the life of the career-achievement winner, actress and dancer Debbie Allen. These highlights, Cochran told the group with a knowing smile, amounted to “what I would call concrete visual evidence.” This was real evidence as opposed to that which Cochran spent his workweek examining.

By the end of the trial, Cochran had become his client’s surrogate, and the lawyer took every opportunity to promote the Simpson cause outside the courtroom. After court nearly every Friday during the last weeks of the trial, Cochran headed for the airport en route to speaking engagements around the country-including journeys to Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Washington and around California. In his remarks, he invariably seized on the Simpson case as the paradigmatic civil rights issue of the day. On August 20 in Philadelphia, for example, Cochran urged the National Association of Black Journalists to “take on the forces of this country. If you do that, you are using journalism for good… and if you duck this fight, you’ll leave a gaping hole, and the battle for civil rights is lost.” Cochran charged that coverage of the Simpson trial had been too oriented toward the victims. “Even Simpson himself was a victim,” he told the audience of fifteen hundred. “We believe he is wrongfully charged, and he, too, became a victim, but there has been no talk about that.” Paraphrasing the novelist Richard Wright, Cochran told the gathered reporters, “We black folk are history. We are cast in the familiar role as America’s conscience.”

Cochran was even more explicit when, following the last week of testimony in the Simpson trial, he traveled to Washington and spoke before an adoring crowd at the annual legislative conference of the Congressional Black Caucus. In his speech there, he called the trial in Los Angeles the latest landmark in the long civil rights struggle of African-Americans-a series of events that, as he summarized it, included Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, the Rodney King trial, and, “yes, even the Simpson case.”

It is difficult to determine with precision what impact Cochran’s speeches had on the jury. In interviews after the trial, jurors said they had been unaware of Cochran’s specific public assertions about the case. Yet Cochran’s behavior over the course of the entire case, both in court and especially in public toward the end, attempted to define the case solely in racial terms. By the end of the case, all the jurors did know how contentious a national civil rights issue the trial had become. Thus, Cochran’s waving of the bloody shirt of racial resentment must be judged a tactical success. When excused juror Jeanette Harris paraphrased the worries of jurors in the case-“An African-American might say, ‘I can’t say he’s guilty because I want to walk out of here’ ”-she reflected the heightened political sensitivities about the case, which Cochran helped foment.

Cochran’s high public profile had another impact as well: It drove Robert Shapiro crazy. In part, Shapiro’s reaction arose from simple jealousy over the attention paid to Cochran, especially in comparison with his own ever more negligible role in the defense. Also, as racial perceptions over the case hardened, Shapiro’s position in his own (white) world grew ever more uncomfortable. In this respect, Cochran had nothing but contempt for Shapiro’s uneasiness. “I know Shapiro’s problem,” Cochran said to allies on the defense team, “but I’m a hero in my community.”

I had an unusually direct view of Shapiro’s dilemma. In May 1995, Mark Fuhrman filed a libel suit against me, The New Yorker, and Shapiro in connection with my original story about Fuhrman the previous year. (Fuhrman would drop his case during the week of the verdict.) Although Shapiro had generally steered clear of me after that issue of The New Yorker ran, the libel case started his competitive juices flowing, and we often talked about it in the courthouse hallway. In short order, however, Shapiro would turn these conversations into diatribes against his colleagues on the defense team, especially Cochran (even more than Bailey). One day during the presentation of the defense case, for example, Shapiro told me that Cochran had interrupted him when he was talking to a lawyer for one of the witnesses. “I’m shaking hands with this lawyer, and you know what he says to me?” Shapiro recounted. “He says, ‘We got no time for chitchat. We got to work now.’ ” Shapiro went on, “I’ve never been treated this way in my life. It’s like they want me to look bad. In front of the jury, they give me questions to ask, and they’re bad questions.” The heart of Shapiro’s complaints always returned, however, to publicity. “Johnnie keeps track of what show everyone is on. He watches everything. He doesn’t work. It’s unbelievable.” Shapiro did have a point about Cochran’s obsession with the media (which, of course, was matched by Shapiro’s). On September 7, for example, Cochran sent a memo to all the defense attorneys saying, “Effective immediately, per Mr. O.J. Simpson’s request, all media appearances must be approved by yours truly. There will be no exceptions to this policy.”

Cochran and his allies, for their part, more than returned Shapiro’s disdain for them, and with perhaps even greater justification. On another day during the defense case, Shapiro’s fellow defense-team members caught him using a miniature Dictaphone in his pocket to record a meeting in the courthouse lockup among Simpson and his lawyers. As Shapiro later admitted, he was surreptitiously documenting these meetings so he could include them in the book he was planning to write about the case. Scheck and Neufeld, who believe strongly in the sanctity of the attorney-client privilege, were beside themselves with outrage at Shapiro over the tape-recording. On the rare occasions that Shapiro deigned to attend defense-team meetings, the atmosphere was poisonous.

To their credit, the prosecutors did not turn on each other in the waning days of the trial, but they didn’t entertain any great hopes of victory, either. By and large, they felt doomed by even the small number of excerpts that Ito had allowed from McKinny’s tapes. Still, the prosecution put together a smashing start to its brief rebuttal case-one the increasingly stupefied jury seemed barely to notice (and would scarcely comment upon after the trial). The rebuttal case began with the one positive bit of fallout from Darden’s glove fiasco. Amateur photographers around the country began searching their files for photographs of Simpson wearing leather gloves at football games. Several found examples, which they sent to the prosecution in Los Angeles. The first, taken on December 29, 1990, at a Chicago Bears game, was the most striking. The glove not only had identical features to the Aris model recovered in 1994, but this glove also looked tight on Simpson’s hand, just as the evidence gloves had. Richard Rubin, the glove expert, returned to the stand to say that he was “100 percent certain” that the gloves in the photographs were those rare Aris Lights, style 70263.

Neither side wanted to give the other the last word, so the case wound down, like a dying metronome, with each side calling a final few witnesses. The defense closed on a quasi-comic note, calling a pair of organized-crime informants, the brothers Larry and Tony “The Animal” Fiato. With their earrings and dyed hair, this duo looked like extras from a low-budget crime picture, but they actually served the defense cause very well.

The Fiato brothers had worked as informants in an unrelated criminal case investigated by Detective Tom Lange, Phil Vannatter’s partner. In January 1995, just as the Simpson trial was getting under way, the Fiatos were preparing for their testimony in one of these other cases when they started chatting with Vannatter. The topic turned to the Simpson case and the detectives’ controversial decision to leave the murder scene and go to O.J.’s home on Rockingham. They claimed that Vannatter said, apparently sarcastically, “We didn’t go up there with the intention of saving lives. He was the suspect.”

In a final day of testimony, September 19, the defense called four witnesses-Vannatter; Michael Wacks, an FBI agent who was present; and the two Fiato brothers-to testify about this conversation. All essentially agreed about what Vannatter had said, and all pretty much concluded that it seemed the detective had been joking. Yet the whole scene left a seedy impression of Vannatter in particular and the police as a whole. The defense succeeded, at the last moment, in raising a series of embarrassing questions. Was Vannatter’s long-questioned justification for going to Rockingham really true? What did he really tell the Fiato brothers? Why was the co-lead detective discussing the Simpson case at all with a pair of mafia informants? All these questions hung awkwardly in the air as the jury was about to get the case.

Yet the prosecutors couldn’t leave well (or badly) enough alone. Rather than simply ignore the Fiato sideshow, the prosecutors decided to call one final, final witness-the last of the trial, and one who served rather well as an emblem for the futility of the government’s efforts in this case.

On the morning of September 20, Marcia Clark called Keith D. Bushey, the ramrod-straight police officer who had served as the top LAPD administrator for the western quarter of the city in June 1994. Bushey testified that Detective Ron Phillips had called him at about 2:30 A.M. on June 13 to inform him that Nicole Brown Simpson’s body had been found. Bushey said that on hearing the news, he remembered that several members of John Belushi’s family had heard of his death through the news media. Bushey thought that was unfortunate so, he said, he ordered Phillips “to find O.J. Simpson just as soon as humanly possible and notify O.J. Simpson of his ex-wife’s death.” Clark thus wanted to use Bushey to convince the jury that Vannatter and the other detectives really had been telling the truth all along-that they went over to Rockingham to notify Simpson that his ex-wife had died.

The imperious Bushey never knew what hit him on cross-examination. Johnnie Cochran understood the LAPD better than any of the prosecutors. He knew how the police groveled before celebrities. The sinister brilliance of his examination of Bushey-and, indeed, of his defense in general-was that he made the preferential treatment accorded Simpson look like a different, more nefarious, kind of singling out. Cochran knew that Bushey would have to lie-that he couldn’t admit that celebrities won special favors from the LAPD. So Cochran spun those lies to his client’s advantage.

“Are you saying that the LAPD department in this case gave preferential treatment by sending four detectives to O.J. Simpson’s house in the early morning hours?” Cochran asked.

“No,” Bushey replied. “First of all, I don’t like the word ‘preferential treatment.’ ”

“Okay,” Cochran parried. “That was the word used by the prosecution.”

“Well, I don’t care…,” Bushey answered.

“You don’t like the word ‘preferential’ because on the side of the police car it says ‘protect and serve’ all the people?”

“That’s correct.”

“You’re supposed to treat all people alike, aren’t you?”

“We tried to,” Bushey answered glumly.

“And fair? You try?”

“Sure,” said Bushey.

Cochran found the heart of the issue a moment later when he asked, “In the course of your responsibilities that morning, were you more concerned about the department’s image than you were about investigating these very brutal murders?”

“Certainly not,” said Bushey, but the truth was very much the opposite.

The prosecution thus unaccountably completed its presentation in the O.J. Simpson murder case with a pious, double-talking fixture of the LAPD brass. And that might not have been even the worst of it. For in addition to everything else, Keith Bushey was a dead ringer for the most hated man in black Los Angeles-the former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, Daryl Gates.

From the day he was hired in the case, Cochran teased the press with the possibility of Simpson testifying in his own defense. The lawyer said repeatedly that he wanted O.J. to testify and that O.J. himself wanted to testify, but these comments were just public relations. With the exception of Bailey, who actually did want Simpson to take the stand, no one on the defense team ever took the idea very seriously. Bailey thought, with good reason, that Simpson would have no chance of resuming anything like his former life unless he addressed the charges from the witness stand. Cochran and Shapiro were more worried about losing the case, and their view prevailed.

Still, even in jail, Simpson was as obsessed as ever by his image, and Cochran found an opportunity for him to put his point across. As part of the formalities of ending the case, Ito had to ask Simpson on September 22 whether he waived his right to testify. Cochran, in turn, requested that Simpson be allowed to make “a brief statement” as part of his waiver. Even though the jury was not present, Clark objected, saying that “this is a very obvious defense bid to get material admitted through those conjugal visits that is not admitted in court… Please don’t do this, Your Honor, I beg you.”

Cochran replied with great indignation. “There seems to be this great fear of the truth in this case,” he said. “This is still America. And we can talk. We can speak. Nobody can stop us.” (A rather odd complaint on behalf of a client who had already written a bestselling book from jail.) Ito caved, and Simpson rose to deliver a sound bite for the evening news.

“Good morning, Your Honor,” he said. “As much as I would like to address some of the misrepresentations made about myself and Nicole concerning our life together, I’m mindful of the mood and the stamina of this jury. I have confidence, a lot more it seems than Ms. Clark has, of their integrity, and that they’ll find-as the record stands now-that I did not, would not, and could not have committed this crime. I have four kids-two kids I haven’t seen in a year. They asked me every week, ‘Dad, how much longer?’ ”

This was more than even Ito could take, and he cut Simpson off with a curt, “All right.”

Simpson said, “I want this trial over.”

Even this brief monologue offered a useful insight into Simpson’s character. Throughout the trial, his obsession remained the “misrepresentations” about his relationship with Nicole, especially the notion that he was imploring Nicole to come back to him. Typically, too, he attributed his decision not to testify to the “mood and stamina” of the jury, when the real reason had more to do with his lead lawyers’ belief in his guilt. The statement was, in short, another snapshot of Simpson’s narcissism.

Tuesday, September 26, 1995, broke chilly and drizzly. During the fall and winter of the previous year, Southern California had been afflicted with some of the coldest and wettest weather in recent history. A normal spring and summer, hot and dry, had followed. Now, on the day that summations were to begin, it appeared that the seasons had changed once more. Jury selection had commenced 365 days earlier. The trial of O.J. Simpson had taken one year.

Even before she uttered her first words to the jury, Marcia Clark was exhausted, with large half moons of purple under each eye. She looked emaciated beneath her simple beige jacket. The chicken salads delivered to her office every lunch hour had often gone untouched. Not so her silver cigarette lighter, the one inscribed with the words TRUTH AND JUSTICE. For all these months, she had fueled herself with an unending relay of Dunhills.

First, Clark thanked the jury, which was customary but not, for her, heartfelt. She and her colleagues had traveled a long way since the optimistic close to jury selection. Over the course of the trial, Clark had felt no warmth from this group, no sympathy for the victims, no core of emotional revulsion at the murders. Clark’s instincts about juries had not entirely deserted her, even if enlightenment came far too late. She had come to see that these were fearful jurors, more concerned about the reaction to their verdict than about reaching the right one. They took few notes; they never smiled or frowned; they gave no sense of themselves away-they were too frightened to reveal anything. As the race issue took over the case, the prosecutors knew above all that they needed a courageous jury, and they sensed-correctly, as it turned out-that they didn’t have one.

Clark’s first words about the facts of the case included a revealing slip of the tongue. “Let me come back to Mark Fuhrman for a minute,” she said. Actually, she had not mentioned him before, so she was not really coming “back” to him. It just seemed that way, for the defense had succeeded so completely in making Fuhrman the center of this case. Like it or not, everyone in this trial was always coming back to Mark Fuhrman.

“Did he lie when he testified here in this courtroom saying that he did not use racial epithets in the last ten years?” Clark continued. “Yes. Is he a racist? Yes. Is he the worst LAPD has to offer? Yes. Do we wish that this person was never hired by LAPD? Yes. Should LAPD have ever hired him? No. In fact, do we wish there were no such person on the planet? Yes.

“But the fact that Mark Fuhrman is a racist and lied about it on the witness stand does not mean that we haven’t proven the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and it would be a tragedy if, with such overwhelming evidence, ladies and gentlemen, as we have presented to you, you found the defendant not guilty in spite of all that, because of the racist attitudes of one police officer.”

This immediate and categorical denunciation of Fuhrman was probably the best Clark could have done under the circumstances, but it also underlined how the racial issue paralyzed the prosecution. Yes, Fuhrman was racist, but Simpson was still guilty. The yes/but formulation represented the dominant motif of the summation that followed over the next five hours. Yes, the investigation had been imperfect; yes, the criminalists made mistakes-but the evidence led only to this defendant. Clark was rushed and a little scattered as she attempted to pull all the complex strands of evidence together, but still she delivered an adequate, professional summation-and a persuasive one for a jury willing to listen.

In one passage, Clark drew on the vast changes the trial had wrought in her own life. She thought the jurors might wonder just what Simpson had been doing in the narrow passageway behind Kaelin’s room, the place where he knocked into the air conditioner and dropped the glove. “You are thinking, why not drop it in a Dumpster on the way home?” she said. But Clark suggested that this wasn’t possible. “He can’t. He can’t, because he is famous. If someone sees him hanging around near a Dumpster on that night of all nights, they are going to recognize him, and he is going to have a witness.” Clark came up with this theory because now she, too, was noticed everywhere she went, and she believed that Simpson, who had far more experience in being famous, had even factored his celebrity into his plans for murder.

In her fury at Darden after the glove demonstration, Clark had decided for a while that she didn’t want him doing any part of the summations. She would do it all herself. But Clark’s anger cooled, and she ultimately ceded the domestic-violence portion of the case to him. Ito had decreed that there would be evening sessions during closing statements, so Darden rose to address the jury at shortly after seven in the evening.

Television, of course, was sending the proceedings around the world, but this first nighttime session of the case gave the courtroom a curious intimacy. We were, after all, nearly the only people in that vast and sterile building, and the uniqueness of the experience gave the room a strange glow. Chris Darden captured that mood and that moment. This case-chiefly Cochran’s race-baiting-had taken its toll on Darden. The public display of his shortcomings as a lawyer had pained him as well. Darden had a great deal of help with this summation; it was written chiefly by fellow prosecutor Scott Gordon and a private stalking and domestic-violence expert named Gavin de Becker. But just as Darden deserved the blame for his several failures in that courtroom, so too did he earn the credit for this triumph.

Darden used a perfect metaphor for the Simpson marriage: a burning fuse. He noted that the defense had argued that “just because” there was marital discord, “it doesn’t mean anything… Well, this isn’t a ‘just because’ issue. This is a ‘because’ issue. It is because he hit her in the past. And because he slapped her and threw her out of the house and kicked her and punched her and grabbed her around the neck… And it’s because he used a baseball bat to break the windshield of her Mercedes back in 1985. And it’s because he kicked her door down in 1993… It’s because of a letter he wrote her… June the sixth, talking about the IRS. It’s because he stalked her.” Darden then took each of these domestic-violence incidents in chronological order and punctuated them with the phrase “And the fuse is burning.” He played the pair of 911 calls-the wordless slaps from 1989, and the terrified “He’s going to kill me!” from four years later.

Darden closed for the night by recalling one of the briefest witnesses in the trial-the district attorney’s investigator who drilled open Nicole’s safe-deposit box after her death. There wasn’t much in there: her will; letters of apology from O.J. after his 1989 conviction; and the photographs of Nicole’s beaten face from that incident. But Darden asserted that Nicole had a larger purpose for preserving those few items in the way she did. “She put those things there for a reason,” Darden said quietly. “She is leaving you a road map to let you know who it is who will eventually kill her. She knew in 1989. She knew it. And she wants you to know it.”

The defense team held weekly meetings around a big table in Cochran’s suite of offices. At these conclaves, Cochran would often take on the persona of a preacher and declaim in mock solemnity about each lawyer’s assignment. One day near the end of the case, Cochran was telling Bailey his plans for how they were going to win. “I will bring the brothers and sisters to the table of acquittal,” he told Bailey, “but you, sir, are responsible for the Demon.”

The Demon was the defense team’s nickname for juror number three, Anise Aschenbach, a sixty-year-old woman who was one of only two whites left on the panel. The self-confident and poised Aschenbach had said during jury selection that her advocacy once changed the minds of all eleven of her fellow jurors in another case. Throughout the trial, Aschenbach was the one juror the defense feared might hold out for conviction. Along the way, Cochran and Bailey sensed that she particularly admired Bailey’s courtroom style, which led to Cochran’s instruction to him. (In fact, the defense missed Aschenbach’s signals about Bailey. “I couldn’t stand that creep,” she told me after the trial.)

Still, the admonition to Bailey illustrated how Johnnie Cochran saw his role in the case. He would take care of the nine black jurors-the brothers and sisters-and one of the white lawyers could handle the rest. In the waning days of the trial, Shapiro lobbied Simpson to be allowed to deliver the second defense summation, but Cochran and the rest of the defense team shot down that idea. Shapiro didn’t know the facts well enough; he would only be reading what Barry Scheck had prepared for him. Simpson, too, thought Scheck deserved the white-lawyer slot. (Bailey had played too small a role in the trial even to be considered.)

When Cochran began his address to the jury on Wednesday, September 27, he started in a conventional way. He attacked the prosecutors’ time line, principally their theory that Simpson had killed the two victims at 10:15 P.M. He dwelled on the glove demonstration and used a catchy phrase that had been suggested to him by Gerry Uelman: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Cochran continued to ignore or downplay domestic violence. “He is not perfect. He is not proud of some of the things he did,” the lawyer said at last. “But they don’t add up to murder.” Cochran even took a silly turn when he put a black knit cap on his head to suggest the absurdity of someone as famous as O.J. Simpson using a disguise. “If I put this knit cap on, who am I?” Cochran asked. “I’m still Johnnie Cochran with a knit cap.” (In fact, wearing a knit cap at night can be an effective disguise-one favored in particular by the navy SEALs, who had been Simpson’s tutors on the set of Frogman shortly before the murders.)

But Cochran was only warming up to the crux of his argument, about the LAPD. “If you can’t trust the messengers, watch out for their messages: Vannatter, the man who carries the blood; Fuhrman, the man who finds the glove.” Cochran realized that Fuhrman’s role in the case was, in the end, fairly minor, so he threw Vannatter in with the disgraced Fuhrman. Cochran even had a chart for the jury, entitled “Vannatter’s Big Lies,” and he called the two men the “twins of deception” and then the “twin demons of deception” and finally “the twin devils of deception.” This was, of course, monstrously unfair to Vannatter, whose errors stemmed more from laziness than malevolence.

This was, in the end, the classic Johnnie Cochran summation-a variant of one he had given many times before. He said the case was really about the police, not his client. The only difference in this case was that the stakes were so much higher. “Your verdict goes far beyond these doors of this courtroom,” he advised. “That’s not to put any pressure on you, just to tell you what is really happening out there.” It was, one supposes, just a sort of courtesy to warn the jurors what their lives might be like if they happened to vote to convict this man.

So what was the jury to do? “Stop this cover-up. Stop this cover-up. If you don’t stop it, then who? Do you think the police department is going to stop it? Do you think the D.A.’s office is going to stop it? Do you think we can stop it by ourselves? It has to be stopped by you… Who, then, polices the police? You police the police. You police them by your verdict. You are the ones to send the message.” Several times he referred to Fuhrman as a “genocidal racist,” so that there was only one appropriate point of reference for this man. “There was another man not too long ago in the world who had those same views… This man, this scourge, became one of the worst people in the history of this world, Adolf Hitler, because people didn’t care or didn’t try to stop him. He had the power over his racism and his antireligion. Nobody wanted to stop him, and it ended up in World War Two.” Cochran then exhaled and muttered with disgust, “The conduct of this man”-and it wasn’t clear who, Hitler or Fuhrman.

Scheck followed for a brisk tour of the forensic issues in the case. It was, at times, extremely arcane: “The EAP typing system is something that looks at antigens on the outside of that red blood cell.” But Scheck did make clear the defense position that the police had cleverly planted the blood on the socks at Rockingham and on the rear gate at Bundy-though at the same time they had incompetently contaminated the blood on the walkway at Bundy. The unifying theme came from Henry Lee. “In the words of Dr. Lee,” Scheck said, “something is wrong. Something is terribly wrong with the evidence in this case.”

That evening, the last night of the case, the prosecutors gathered on the eighteenth floor to plot strategy for a rebuttal. Bedeviled by dental problems for years, Clark was now finding the pain excruciating. She made an emergency appointment with a dentist at six-thirty that evening, and it turned out she had an abscess. She was knocked out with general anesthesia, operated on, and sent back to the court house at around ten P.M. She stayed until just before four in the morning.

Five hours later, on September 29, the prosecutors spoke for the last time. Frazzled and drained, Clark unwisely tried to respond to each of Scheck’s assertions. The defense lawyers interrupted her more than forty times with objections. Ito overruled most of them, but they succeeded in preventing Clark from establishing any kind of rhythm. For once Clark lacked the energy to fight back.

There was one hint of what was to come. Bill Hodgman had spent much of the previous month working on an elaborate chart entitled “Unrefuted Evidence,” a summary of all the non-DNA, non-Fuhrman-related evidence in the case. It was arranged in the form of a big pyramid, and Clark saved it for her conclusion. The chart was extremely impressive, and it listed things like Nicole’s purchase of the gloves, Park’s fruitless buzzing for Simpson, the blood to the left of the shoe prints and the cut on Simpson’s left hand. It was a rather complicated graphic, and Clark did not discuss every point on it, so she offered the jurors an option.

“If you would like to take notes on this,” Clark said, “I can leave it up for a little while.”

Not one juror wrote down a thing.

When I left Ito’s courtroom on September 29 and stood before the steam tables in the cafeteria of the Criminal Courts Building, I had only one thought: Praise be-the last lunch (at least before deliberations). Clark’s haggard appearance reflected the feelings of everyone involved with the trial. I ordered my umpteenth chicken burrito and staggered to a table with Sally Ann Stewart, a reporter for USA Today. The room was uncharacteristically deserted for that time of day, and we enjoyed the calm as we discussed the end of the trial and the resumption of our normal lives.

A few moments later, though, Johnnie Cochran, Barry Scheck, Carl Douglas, and Larry Schiller arrived. They set their trays down at a centrally located table, and six Fruit of Islam bodyguards, dressed in their trademark bow ties, formed a circle with their backs to Cochran’s table and their eyes trained warily outward. The guards had first appeared in the courthouse at the beginning of that final week and had added a new level of uneasiness to an environment that was already extraordinarily charged. In truth, Cochran was probably more miser than provocateur. Cochran had received threats, and what really appealed to him about the Fruit of Islam guards was that they had volunteered their services. Still, after the Fuhrman tapes, and after all of his fiery speeches around the country, Cochran had imported into the courthouse the very symbols of Louis Farrakhan’s strident black nationalism. At that Friday lunch, however, the presence of the grim-faced sentries seemed merely ludicrous, for they had only two reporters and Rose, the cashier, to monitor for false moves.

Then, a few minutes later, Robert Shapiro arrived. There had been a time when he was probably the most famous lawyer in America, but by this final Friday, his voluble, visible role had been usurped. Though the other defense lawyers often came and went together, Shapiro arrived and left by himself, and on this day, he paid Rose, took a long look at his colleagues and their sentinels, and sat down by himself at a small table nearby.

Sally and I, feeling a little sorry for him-and always eager to chat with an insider-asked him to sit with us. He picked up his tray, sidled over, and joined in our reveries of life after O.J. His own fantasy, he said, would be to take a month off and join Oscar De La Hoya’s training camp at Big Bear Lake. A serious and skilled amateur boxer at the age of fifty-three, he couldn’t wait to tear into the heavy bag. As always with Shapiro, though, the topic soon turned to his resentment of his fellow defense lawyers. He said he had been appalled when Cochran brought the Fruit of Islam into his entourage and that he had been disappointed by Cochran’s summation the previous day. “It was nothing but race, race, race,” he said. “And why am I not reading that in the paper? All I hear is how great his summation was. Why do I keep reading this?” In truth, some reporters had excoriated Cochran’s appeal for an acquittal based on racial solidarity, but Shapiro’s bitterness was such that he had registered only the favorable words about his colleague.

Meanwhile, Marcia Clark took the Goldman family out for a drink after her rebuttal summation on Friday. She then fled Los Angeles. She took her two boys up the coast to Santa Barbara, to the home of her friend Lynn Reed Baragona. There, Clark slept in peace, played with her kids, and did the crossword puzzle for the first time in more than a year. On Sunday, Clark and Baragona decided to take a trip to the local mall. Amid the upscale stores in that tony Pacific Ocean setting, Clark started to absorb just how famous she had become: As she shopped, she encountered spontaneous outbursts of applause from fellow customers.

Toward the end of the day, Clark and her friend were walking along a long corridor, and a pair of black women started coming toward them from the opposite direction. They were, it seemed, just about the only African-American shoppers in the whole place, and they clearly recognized the Simpson prosecutor. As their paths crossed, one of the black women leaned over and uttered a single word, just loud enough so that Marcia Clark would hear:

“Innocent.”

The jurors selected a foreperson on the afternoon of Friday, September 29, just after Clark completed the last summation. The assignment went to juror number one, Armanda Cooley, a fifty-one-year-old black woman who worked as an administrative assistant for the city of Los Angeles. Cooley was obviously a levelheaded and friendly person, and she had steered clear of most of the jury tempests during the trial. Both sides figured she would be the choice. Judge Ito did not allow the jury to begin considering the evidence on that Friday, however. After they selected the foreperson, Ito sent them back to the hotel; deliberations were set to begin on Monday morning.

Shortly before summations, the sheriff’s deputies supervising the jurors at the Inter-Continental Hotel told their charges that they would have to start preparing for the end of their sequestration. Through eight months at the hotel, the jurors had accumulated a great many possessions in their rooms. The deputies told them that by the time of deliberations, all of their belongings would have to fit into one or two suitcases.

Over the last weekend, the deputies made an additional announcement to the jurors. On Monday, and on each day of deliberations to follow, the jurors would be required to pack all of their remaining belongings and take them to the courthouse. This was a major imposition. It also made no sense, because once the jurors reached their verdict, Ito had decided that he was going to delay the announcement overnight. Yet the jurors, beaten down after so many months of confinement, did not protest. They accepted the prospect of rising daily at dawn and packing, then rushing off to court at their usual 7:45 A.M. for as long as it would take to reach a verdict. But this pointlessly strict policy by the sheriff’s deputies represented at least a subconscious cue to the jurors to reach a quick decision.

At 9:16 A.M. on Monday, October 2, the twelve members of the jury settled into chairs in the deliberation room just across the back hallway from Ito’s courtroom. Twenty-five minutes later, Ito’s clerk, Deirdre Robertson, wheeled in a cart piled high with trial exhibits arrayed in black binders. Robertson closed the door and said the jurors could begin discussing the case.

Armanda Cooley, the foreperson, asked her colleagues for advice about how to proceed. She had never before served on a jury. Several of the jurors suggested that they take an immediate straw poll. But Cooley said that a manual she had been given seemed to suggest that the jury should not call for a show of hands. After a little more discussion, it was agreed that Cooley would conduct a vote by secret ballot, just to get a sense of what everyone was thinking.

“Just write ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ on a piece of paper and put it in the bowl,” Cooley said. After a moment or two, Cooley passed around a glass bowl that Ito’s clerks had kept full of candy over the previous months. When the bowl came back to Cooley, her friend Carrie Bess-like Cooley, a single black woman with grown children and a civil-service job-volunteered to tabulate the responses on a blackboard. Cooley called out the votes, and Bess wrote them down:

Ten for acquittal; two for conviction.

Turning for the first time to the facts of the case, Anise Aschenbach (the defense’s white “demon”) announced she wanted to say something. She had been stewing all weekend. Aschenbach had been so angry during Cochran’s summation that she almost got up and told the lawyer to shut up. “I was so outraged at what he said,” Aschenbach told her fellow jurors. “He wants us to send the LAPD a message. Does he think we’re so stupid that we’re going to send a message rather than decide based on what we heard in the case? I hope I was not the only one offended by his remarks.”

Her fellow jurors responded to these comments with total silence.

Armanda Cooley decided to distribute the exhibit binders. Jurors began leafing through them and offering comments about the evidence. It wasn’t so much a conversation as a series of random observations.

Why wasn’t there more blood around the glove Fuhrman said he found at Rockingham?

Goldman had bruises on his knuckles. If they were from fighting back, why didn’t O.J. have any bruises on his body? (The prosecution had argued that Goldman had injured his hand flailing against the fence behind him.) The jurors knew that Dave Aldana, the Hispanic man in seat four, was a martial arts expert. He got up and demonstrated how to defend in tae kwon do. He thought Goldman had put up a good fight.

If the glove came off Simpson’s hand during the fight, why wasn’t it inside out?

Aschenbach volunteered that she was one of the two votes for conviction. (The other never came forward.) Hearing this, Sheila Woods flashed an angry look at her. Woods was the last surviving member of the Jeanette Harris clique. Since Harris had been thrown off the jury, Woods had had little contact with her fellow jurors. “Why did they go after him as a suspect from the beginning?” Woods said to Aschenbach. “They insulted us with their testimony. They went after that man.”

Someone mentioned the glove demonstration. Brenda Moran, Gina Rosborough, and Lon Cryer all said they thought it didn’t fit on Simpson’s hand.

There was only one reference to DNA tests. Both Dave Aldana and Sheila Woods said they didn’t think it was reliable when all of the DNA came from the back gate at Bundy. This was important to them. (It was, of course, completely wrong, too. While the molecular weight of the DNA on the back gate was higher than that of the other samples, several other tests of blood at the murder scene tied it to Simpson.)

After about an hour of discussion, the topic turned to the testimony of Allan Park, the limousine driver. Carrie Bess said Park didn’t know how many cars had been in Simpson’s driveway. A couple of other jurors disagreed about whether Park had seen a black man at the doorway to the house or walking across the driveway. Others were confused by the time that Park said various events occurred. The group decided by consensus that they would like another look at Park’s testimony.

Shortly before noon, Cooley sent out a note requesting Park’s testimony. She thought the judge would simply send back a transcript the jury could examine, but the judge relayed word that he would have the testimony read in the courtroom starting at 1:00 P.M. The jurors then broke for lunch.

As a former prosecutor, I have always hated read-backs. Even when I was trying my own cases, I used to have trouble staying awake when court reporters did their monotone recitals. This day was no different. I took my usual seat and tried to focus on the words as they were spoken. As he had from the beginning, Park struck me as the most powerful government witness in the case. It was absolutely clear that the Bronco was not parked on Rockingham when he arrived to pick up Simpson. Its absence, in my view, doomed O.J. Even worse, from Simpson’s perspective, was that Park was fairly certain that the Bronco had returned by the time they left for the airport-an even more incriminating fact.

Still, when Ito called a break after seventy-five minutes of the read-back to give the court reporter’s voice a rest, I knew I had to escape. I was sure there were going to be lots of read-backs to come, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself by falling asleep in court.

I wandered up to the eighteenth floor and paid a visit to Scott Gordon, the good-natured former Santa Monica cop who was the leading domestic-violence expert in the D.A.’s office. We had been chatting for about ten minutes when his phone rang. I heard only his side of the conversation: “You’re shitting me… Don’t shit me like this… I know you’re shitting me… Really?… Really?” Finally, he hung up.

“Looks like we have a verdict,” he told me.

Back in the jury room, Cooley had taken advantage of the break to ask if all the questions about Park’s testimony had been answered. By consensus, the answer was yes. Suddenly, it seemed, no one had anything more to say. In lieu of returning to the courtroom for the remainder of Park’s testimony, Cooley sent a request to Ito for the verdict forms. Before they arrived Cooley conducted another secret ballot, and this time the vote was unanimous. Just to make sure, Cooley asked each juror to repeat their verdict, and they all said, “Not guilty.” Cooley filled out the forms and pushed the buzzer to the courtroom three times-the signal for a verdict.

It was shortly before 3:00 P.M. The jurors had discussed the merits of the case against O.J. Simpson for about two hours-less time than most other adults in America.

Cochran was giving a speech in San Francisco. Bailey was appearing at a snack food distributors’ convention in Laguna Beach. Clark was in her office. Though Simpson had eleven lawyers representing him in this case, only Carl Douglas was by his side when Armanda Cooley presented the envelope containing the completed verdict forms to Judge Ito.

“We will accept the verdict from you tomorrow morning at ten,” Ito said. “See you tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.”

No one-on either side or in the news media-had predicted so swift a verdict. The entire building seemed afflicted with vertigo. After all these months and all the debates over evidence, strategy, rulings, and rumors, only one question remained: What had the jurors done?

I had spent most of the trial believing that it would end in an acquittal or a hung jury. Then the Park testimony threw me. If that’s all they needed to hear, I thought, they had voted to convict.

The jurors returned to the Inter-Continental for their 266th, and final, night in residence. The hotel threw the jurors a champagne reception in the presidential suite on the nineteenth floor, then turned their last supper into a steak barbecue. Everyone had a few drinks, which loosened tongues. Reyko Butler, one of the two alternates, couldn’t resist asking one of the deliberating jurors how it had all come out. The juror couldn’t resist answering: “N,” the juror said. Not guilty.

This curiosity extended to the sheriff’s deputies as well, who had the same question and received the same answer.

Back at the county jail, Simpson’s lawyers gathered in a final vigil with him. Cochran arrived too late to make it to the jail, but Bailey, Kardashian, and Skip Taft sat on the other side of the glass wall for a last chat. As it turned out, Simpson was in good spirits. “All the deputies here are asking for my autograph,” Simpson told his lawyers. “They hear from their boys over with the jury that it’s going to be the last chance for them to get one.”

It was the last leak in the case-from the sheriff’s deputies guarding the jury to their colleagues guarding Simpson: O.J. was going to walk.

The scene at the courthouse on the morning of Tuesday, October 3, resembled some sinister carnival. Over the course of the trial, the LAPD had made the Criminal Courts Building ever more isolated. First, they banned all parked cars from the adjacent streets to prevent a car bombing. Then they kept all cars off the main artery of Temple Street, right in front of the building. On this last day, the police shut off all traffic in the immediate vicinity of the courthouse. Crowds of people milled about in the empty streets. Except for the trial, all business in downtown Los Angeles seemed to come to a halt.

In the last half hour before 10:00, more than a hundred people jammed the hallway outside of Ito’s courtroom. Bookers for talk shows had taken up more or less permanent residence in that hallway for weeks, and on this day, several stars of the shows joined in the vigil. NBC had forty camera crews ready to roll for reaction to the verdict. ABC had assigned four producers to each juror.

At 9:49 Darden walked into the courtroom alone. Three minutes later, Clark arrived with a retinue of four police bodyguards. At 9:55 Johnnie Cochran, Simpson’s sisters, and their Nation of Islam escorts completed the cast in the courtroom.

At one minute before 10:00, the deputies escorted Simpson from his lockup, and he nodded to his family just as he had every day.

For perhaps the first time in the entire trial, Ito appeared and started the proceedings precisely on schedule.

“Counsel,” Ito said to the lawyers, “is there anything else we need to take up before we invite the jurors to join us?”

For once, the answer was no.

The jurors filed out in their usual order, expressionless as always. They looked ahead vacantly. None of them met Simpson’s eye.

Ito directed Deirdre Robertson to hand the envelope containing the verdict forms to one of the sheriff’s deputies, who walked it over to Armanda Cooley. “Madam Foreperson,” Ito said, “would you please open the envelope and check the condition of the verdict forms?”

Cooley did so.

“Are they the same forms you signed, and are they in order?”

“Yes, they are.”

Ito cautioned the audience that “if there is any disruption during the reading of the verdicts, the bailiffs will have the obligation to remove any persons disrupting these proceedings.”

Ito paused. “Mr. Simpson,” he instructed, “would you please stand and face the jury.” Unbidden, Cochran and the rest of the defense team rose with him. “Mrs. Robertson,” Ito cued.

The judge’s clerk stumbled as she read the title of the case, then steadied herself as she came to the verdict.

“We the jury in the above-entitled action find the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder in violation of Penal Code Section 187A, a felony, upon Nicole Brown Simpson, a human being, as charged in count one of the information.”

At the words “not guilty,” Simpson exhaled and gave a sort of half smile. He looked like he was going to cry but didn’t. Cochran stood behind him as they faced the jury, and on hearing “not guilty” Cochran pumped his fist quickly, then grabbed Simpson by the shoulder and, in a startlingly intimate gesture, placed his cheek on the back of O.J.’s shoulder. Robert Shapiro looked stricken, crushed. His alienation from his colleagues and client was never more visible than at that moment.

Robertson then proceeded to read the second verdict, that in the murder of Ronald Lyle Goldman. At the second utterance of the words “not guilty,” Kim Goldman let out a trembling howl. She grabbed her hair, then buried her head in her father’s shoulder.

I was sitting right behind Kim, in the second row. Numb with shock, I stared at Simpson and had a single thought: He’s going home. There is no red tape after an acquittal. The handcuffs come off, and you’re on your way.

As Robertson finished the formalities and Ito polled the jury, asking them all whether this was their verdict, noise from the audience grew louder. Everyone in all of the families was crying-for joy, for sorrow, at their release from this extraordinary tension.

“The defendant, having been acquitted of both charges,” Ito said evenly, “is ordered… released forthwith. All right. We’ll stand in recess.”

The jurors filed out in their usual silence. From his seat, number six, juror Lon Cryer had the longest walk to the door. He kept his head down most of the way, then turned to the defense table and raised his fist in a black power salute. Then he, too, left the courtroom.

Most of the jurors dissolved into tears when they arrived back in the deliberation room. They hugged and wept and clung to one another for support. After a few minutes, a pair of deputies came to escort them up to the lounge on the eleventh floor, where they had done most of their waiting over the course of the trial. There the tears mostly stopped, and the jurors sat in shell-shocked silence on the couches and easy chairs. Finally, Carrie Bess said something to no one in particular:

“We’ve got to protect our own.”